23 Google Analytics Interview Questions to Crack Any Interview 

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool provided by Google for owners of websites. It helps in understanding your website audiences. Analysing trends of visitor behaviour on your website helps you in reorienting your website for better performance.

All this means that it is an important tool to use for every Marketer or a Business Owner. So, if you are looking for a job in web analytics, here is a list of the top 23 Google Analytics Interview Questions that you must know and answer well.

Let us dive straight into the Google Analytics interview questions that a hiring manager will ask you as you sit in that hot seat to get your first web analytics job. 

1. What is Google Analytics & what are its benefits? 

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Ans: Simply put, Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool that helps in understanding the interactions of your audience with your website. It helps in depicting the data related to your website in graphs and charts in a manner that gives you actionable insights. The key benefits of Google Analytics are: 

  • Understand the pages that are performing well and those which are not. 
  • Gain insights into the geographic locations that work best for you. 
  • Get help in business segmentation and allows yourself to optimize your web pages for a particular audience. 

2. Why is Google Analytics important? 

Ans: Analytics in general and Google Analytics in particular is important for giving Online Marketing the status it has reached today. Analytics gives the ability to a Marketer to track and measure the performance of his promotional campaigns and make them sustainable. Being a free option to analyse web data, Google Analytics has become an important tool for Online Marketers of the day. 

3. What is the role of KPIs in Google Analytics? 

Ans: Read this answer precisely well, this is one of the most frequently asked Google Analytics interview questions. To break it up, KPI stands for Key Performance Indicators. These are specific metrics that are important to a business. Most important KPIs include: No. of visits, no. of clicks, sessions, returning users, first-time users, and bounce rate. It is here where all your optimization starts and ends.  

4. Does Google Analytics support real-time data? 

Ans: Yes, Google Analytics gives you real time data. There is an option to understand the activities of visitors on your website at any given moment. But such analysis does not work well for small business websites or websites with low traffic. Analysing real time data makes logical sense only for big websites with thousands of visitors at a given point of time. 

However, if you are running a systematic paid or a Social Media campaign, this function can do wonders to your efforts. 

5. Explain A/B testing in Google Analytics? 

Ans: A/B testing is another important Google Analytics Question that is almost sure to come your way. A/B testing is a mechanism to identify the best performing variation of a web page. In this, you divert your traffic equally to two pages equally and analyse the results on both the pages. This activity makes the decision making data based as opposed to intuition based.     

6. Is there a way to identify top performing pages using Google Analytics? 

Ans: Yes, that’s an important job that Google Analytics will do for you. And in all honesty, this will be the analysis you’ll be doing at all given times.  In order to find the top 10 most performing pages, just go to the behavior section of Google Analytics and they will be in front of you. 

7. Is there a difference in conversion tracking in AdWords & Analytics? 

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Ans: Yes, they both are different. In the case of AdWords the conversion is attributed to the last Ad click and in Analytics the conversion is attributed to the last interaction made. With respect to the time of conversion, AdWord considers the first click while Analytics considers the final interaction. 

8. What is bounce rate and what %age of it is considered good? 

Ans: An easy Google Analytics interview question the answer which is mostly gotten wrong. Bounce rate is a measure of the number of visitors that come to your website without checking any other page of the website. Higher the bounce rate the worse your page is performing. 30% bounce rate is considered to be normal while that in between 30% – 70% is worrisome. Above 70% gives you a signal that your website needs immediate optimization.    

9. What are properties & views in Google Analytics?

Ans: The top level thing in Google Analytics is an account which may consist of multiple properties. A person can have multiple accounts with the same login credentials. A property is created for every domain or the account that deals with it. An account is eligible to have multiple properties and every property can have multiple views. By the way, a view is a point that gives access to data in the form of reports. 

10. What are dimensions & metrics? 

Ans: We have reports on a table in Google Analytics, dimensions are in rows and metrics are arranged in columns. Dimensions may be a city, browser, geography or product type. On the other hand, metrics are measurements to it such as bounce rate, session duration, events etc.  

11. Can you track Google Adsense campaigns with Google Analytics? 

Ans: Of course you can. In fact it is recommended to use Google Analytics to understand your AdSense campaigns due to the precision of information given.  You will get a point by point report about which of the site pages have performed the best and made you some good AdSense income. 

12. Can you improve your eCommerce sales with the help of Google Analytics? 

Ans: There is a feature to examine achievements of your e-Commerce activities which is called the Goal Funnel. It tells you about the individual shopping activities and give you insights into the sales conversions and related goals. 

13. What is the Acquisition report? 

Ans: Another great question that you should be prepared to answer in a Google Analytics interview. Acquisition report lets you know about the user acquisition on your website through various channels such as keywords, campaigns and source.  It gives you a clear picture on the origin of your website visitors.  

Rapidfire Google Analytics Questions & Answers 

In this section we will deal with some Google Analytics Questions & Answers that will be asked a lot after 2019. It is best to go through them a number of times so that the answers are on the tip of your tongue. 

14. What is a Cohort?  

Ans: Cohort is a name given to a set of customers who share the same characteristics. They might be people who have brought the same kinds of products or those that have bought products on the same occasion. It helps in analysing trends in a group. 

15. What is CTR?

Ans: This is a very basic Google Analytics interview question that everyone must know. CTR means click through rate. For example, if 100 people visit a blog post, and 5 click on it, the CTR is 5%. It is an important calculation to make, especially if you are running paid ads. 

16. What is Average CPC? 

Ans: CPC means cost per click. When you talk about its average, it’s the total number of clicks that an Ad has received divided by the total money spent on it.

17. What is Conversion Rate? 

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Ans: It is the %age of the total number of goals met by campaign in view of the total clicks generated by a keyword.  

18. What are Pages Per Session?  

Ans: It is the total number of pages viewed after a visitor lands to your website through an ad campaign. 

19. What is a destination in Google Analytics?

Ans: A conversion gets recorded when any specific URL gets loaded. You can either  have the URL to exactly match or you may just mention the starting part of the URL. 

20. What does session duration means? 

Ans: It is the amount of time that a user spends on a specific part of the website. The more time that a person spends, the better is your performance. 

21. What is an event in Google Analytics? 

Ans: You gotta get this answer right in a Google Analytics Interview. An event is a word for the collection of any interaction with your website. Examples are: Clicks, downloads, video plays etc. 

22. How can you create a goal?

Ans: There are four steps to goal creation in google analytics: 

  • Go to “Admin” 
  • Click on “Goals” under view
  • Now click on “New Goal” 
  • Then create your goal by following the wizard  

23. What is Benchmarking? 

Ans: Benchmarking is a way to compare your site’s performance to previous results. It also lets you compare your results with industry averages. It is extremely useful in competitor analysis.  

Conclusion 

This was a comprehensive list of Google Analytics questions and answers that you must be prepared to answer to get through a Google Analytics interview. You should check out a full course on Web Analytics to get more insights. 

Google Analytics Books

Top 4 Google Analytics Books You Should Read Now

Google Analytics is surely one of the most powerful tools that helps the marketers and advertisers to monitor and analyse the traffic on their websites.

Google Analytics not only gives a plethora of information about the visitor but also give insights into what are they looking for on your website and how are they getting landed on your website. Furthermore, it provides valuable insights that can help you to shape the success strategy of your business.

Almost all the businesses nowadays have an online presence through the website, thus, it becomes very important for you to learn the structure and performance of your website.

Irrespective of the fact that there are so many other another analytics management platforms, Google Analytics still remains a free & highly relevant solution for managing the analytics of your website.

So, as marketers, you need to have thorough and step by step knowledge of implementing and executing Google Analytics in an optimal manner. Mentioned below are the top 4 books that will take you to the cores of Google Analytics.

Book No 1: Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics

Author – Brian Clifton

Google Analytics Books
Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics

An authentic classic Google Analytics book that puts forward all the relevant information needed to measure the performance of the website and stay competitive by using Google Analytics.

Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics real-life examples that give a clear demonstration on how to manage Google Analytics optimally. With this Google Analytics book, you can easily go through the installation process and configurations of Google Analytics.

This book also provides clear insights into how to turn the available data of the website into quantitative and measurable information to further understand the visitor’s experience on your website.

When you get a comprehensive understanding of what is happening on your website, you can easily put business oriented ideas to acquire more visitors and drive more conversions.

This book on Google Analytics is specially inclined towards those audiences who have reached beyond the basic levels. Hence, the digital marketers, webmasters and senior managers in digital marketers are the apt readers of the book.

The digital marketers have already worked on various methods of digital marketing like search engine marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization etc. Hence, most of the chapters that are covered in this book focus on incorporating the analytical skills with the marketing abilities so that the optimal results can be obtained.

Next group is that of the webmasters who are experienced in building the websites. This Google Analytics Book offers special sections to them that focuses on modifying the web page content.

The senior managers in digital marketing are the decision makers who require expert guidance to prepare the data-oriented strategies and consequently create the digital action plan for the organization.

Furthermore, this book provides insights into what can be done in order to obtain the desired results with the help of Google Analytics. On the more, the senior managers are also entitled to benefit with the planning process to create an effective Google Analytics Measurement Team.

In a nutshell, this book on Google Analytics can be used in several ways by various groups of people. After reading this book, you will learn how to implement and use Google Analytics in the best possible way with perfect practice in terms of marketing, conversions and user experience.

Book No 2: Google Analytics Breakthrough From Zero to Business Impact

Authors – Feras Alhlou, Shiraz Asif, Eric Fettman

Google Analytics Books
Google Analytics Breakthrough

Owing to the fact that Google Analytics is quite popular globally, but still, only a few organizations use it to the optimal level. Thus, the objective of this book is to provide a consolidated and laser-focused learning experience that helps the reader to clear all the doubts and confusions regarding the implementation and execution of Google Analytics strategy.

Furthermore, it gives the reader the insights to carry out a strong action plan to build more advanced and future-oriented strategies and techniques.

Google Analytics Breakthrough is comprehensive in approach and thoroughly covers all the key points of fundamentals of strategy measurement, implementation, execution and reporting of crucial statistics.

Apart from focusing on the strategies, techniques and best practices of Google Analytics, this book also emphasizes the pitfalls and common mistakes that marketers tend to make.

Looking at the conversion and competition point of view, this book contains the metrics to improve the key performance indicators like content engagement or lead generating process.

Along with having a detailed discussion on conversion tracking, this book provides the learning techniques to identify the websites and mobile elements that are either helping or hurting your conversion success. Apart from giving full-fledged insights on tracking the conversions, this book also formulates in-depth discussions to understand the concept of ROI (Return on Investment).

Another fascinating fact about this book on Google Analytics is that it includes contributions from some of the leading analytics and optimization practitioners. The inputs and contributions gained from these eminent analytical practitioners add an immeasurable learning experience and a plethora of insights and techniques.

To make the book more interesting and user-friendly, the book contains screenshots, colour diagrams. This gives the reader an interesting and impactful learning experience. Moreover, the book is created with the aim of making almost everything as simple as possible. For successful implementation of the reporting and analytical skills, deep understanding of the concepts is presented.

Taking into consideration the advanced aspect of Google Analytics, the book discusses many specialized techniques like remarketing audience configuration, advanced integrations with the CRM, data extraction, marketing automation and many more.

This book also offers various insights into the streamlined presentation of Google Analytics reporting for making communication relatively easy.

Furthermore, each chapter of this book contains Key Takeaways, Actions and Exercises to let you review the main points of the chapter and test what all have you learnt.

Book No 3: Google Analytics Demystified – A Hand-On Approach

Author – Joel Davis

Google Analytics Books
Google Analytics Demystified

A comprehensive guide with a laser focus to help you master Google Analytics in the easiest way. By uncovering the promising potential of Google Analytics, it guides you to learn the techniques of data application according to your own strategic needs.

Google Analytics Demystified is a perfect guide especially for beginners who are looking forward to mastering Google Analytics at the earliest. This book is a general model giving the insights to the readers on using Google Analytics in the most feasible way.

Being one of the best books for Google Analytics, it gives all the relevant insights that are needed to improve the experience of the visitors. Google Analytics provides the users with information regarding how the visitors see your website, what they do when they come on your website, how much time do they spend etc.

By helping you in recognizing the ways to enhance the online experience, it further assists you in understanding the behavioural preference of the visitors. This understanding of the visitors acts as pillar points in engaging with them and further convincing them to get connected with your website.

The content of the book is not excessively technical and is pretty easy to understand and implement. Also, the book contains a lot of images, graphs, tables and screenshots that enhance the user experience and majorly help the readers to understand the concepts.

Each chapter of the book is concluded by some review questions and exercises. The highlight of the book is that the reader gets the access to a free downloadable website that lets the reader practice the concepts simultaneously. By using the demo website, the readers can practically implement the techniques and concepts without damaging a real website.

Book No 4: Sams Teach Yourself Google Analytics in 10 Minutes

Author – Michael Miller

Google Analytics Books
Sams Teach Yourself Google Analytics

Sams Teach Yourself Google Analytics in 10 Minutes is a series of short lessons that provides you various features of Google Analytics. This book on Google Analytics offers simple, straightforward and practical answers to different Google Analytics queries.

This book is particularly useful when it comes to getting fast results. To accurately measure the performance of the website and improve it in the fastest possible way, you should choose its 10-minute lessons to use Google Analytics.

The time duration for each of the lesson of this book is about 10 minutes and focuses on a particular operation or range of features. The instructions are presented in easy-to-follow steps along with plenty of examples and screenshots to give a practical overview simultaneously.

Along with the normal text and figures, the book also includes sidebars that highlight special kind of information with the aim of circulating the important points fast.

With the help of this book, you will a quick overview on how to create a Google Analytics account and add Google Analytics to their website, define goals and measure the performance of the metrics. Tracking the visitors from search engines, PPC, email and other sources.

Efficient monitoring techniques of specific user actions playing embedded video, selecting Flash menu items, or downloading files can be conducted in included in this book. On the more, this book lets you discover the pages your visitors view, how long they stay, and where they left.

Accurate insights are also provided to customize Google Analytics to work more effectively with your site, capture more accurate information by filtering out internal traffic, improve your site by tracking error pages and broken links and measure AdWords traffic, position, and e-commerce performance.

Conclusion

Irrespective of whether you are a fresher or a professional in digital marketing landscape, these top 4 Google Analytics books can be of great support for you. These books have all the insights to let you clear your concepts and proficiently implement them in optimizing your campaigns and websites.

Top 5 Tips For Effective Web Analytics Strategy

Web Analytics is defined simply as the measure, acquisition, analysis and the reporting of complete Internet data for the objective of understanding and optimizing Web usage. Strategy over tactic is a basic rule that is to be followed for a website’s accurate web analytics. A strategy is a plan of action that is specifically designed to achieve the goal. Whereas a tactic is a tool that is used to accomplish the goal following the strategy adopted by the officials of the company.

Making the strategy according to your business plan is the most important factor. It was analyzed that, “34% of marketers reported that their analytics was not integrated at all with their business plan” which may sound foolish but is a truth.

Top Five Actions That Make Your Web Analytics Strategy Effective

1. Determine The Basic Agenda Of Your Website

If you want to develop a useful web analytics strategy, setting up a primary goal for your website is the first and one of the major steps. In order to attain success, it is important for you to define the objectives and goals of your website.  The main focus of a website should always rely either on gaining revenue or reducing the overall cost, which is not at all possible if there is no agenda of a website.

Strategy

For an instance, E-commerce Sites that are specifically designed to promote the products and services of a company over Internet. The basic agenda for these sites is to sell more and more products online, in order to maximize the profitability of the firm.

The basic agenda of these websites is to increase conversions, improve customer acquisition, improvise customer retention and to increase the frequency and variety of the purchases of existing customers.

2. Main Focus On Conversions

The success of a website is determined on the number of page views, traffic of the visitors and most popular pages amongst all. The performance of a website does not solely depends upon the rise in the number of visitors from the previous month. Rather the overall performance of a website relies on the activities that are being performed by the regular visitors of the website. If the visitors are interacting more on your website, then your website is performing well as per the relevant measures. For instance, If an E-commerce site has increased 80%of the traffic, but there is no improvement in the sales, then it will be considered as a failure. It is important for an E-commerce website to convert its visitors into buyers. The main aim of an E-commerce site is to increase sales, rather than just bring traffic to the website. If talking about an E-commerce site the increase in traffic should result in the increase of sales, only then it is considered to be a successful marketing campaign.

ConversionRate

Except for the successful shopping cart checkouts, there are various non-commerce activities followed by websites that lead to conversions:

  • Setting up an account on the website
  • Download document
  • Newsletter registration
  • Respond of consumers to Email campaigns
  • Purchase of goods and services from the website
  • Event Sign-Ups
  • Profile Update
  • Video viewing
  • Making a payment
  • Rating and article on a website, or forwarding it to any of the friends
  • Link-back posts

3. Key Performance Indicators

Build actionable KPIs to pace up the concept of focusing on converting leads into conversions. Context as always needs to be relevant and unique in the data of web analytics. According to web metric: Unique and meaningful content is capable of bringing up 20% of hike in the number of page views on a website. If we talk about an E-commerce website, their basic agenda is to spread awareness amongst people about the products and services provided by them. They are supposed to keep people upgraded with what’s new on their website via online platforms. However, if we take an informative website, their primary goal is to increase self-service. With an increment of 20% page views on an informative website, it is generally assumed that the visitors might have faced difficulty navigating the website. And this isn’t a good news for any informative website.

kpi

Also, most of the users do not know how to analyze their website with the help of Google Analytics. Most of the users are not aware of where to start from, identify and report on the insightful data of the website that might help the marketers make crucial business decisions. Web analytics requires a methodology to translate the goals and objectives of any business into Key Performance Indicators. For example, KPI’s may be:

      • Increase in the Conversion ratio per visitor over last month
      • Increased Percentage of purchases per inquiry over last month
      • Increase in the Rate of forms completed per visitor over previous month
      • Increase in the Average number of visitors who sign-ups for a particular event over last month

4. Marketing Processes: Automate and Integrate

It becomes really valuable for a marketer to tie up web analytics data to other repositories and marketing tools. For example, it is beneficial to tie up various marketing tools such as E-mail, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), the line of business databases, off-line purchase repositories, and phone systems providing sophisticated cross-channel analytics to web analytics. Integrating and connecting disparate marketing tools are used to improvise the overall marketing campaign results. These tools remarkably enhance the campaign performance by enlightening upon the insights on the identities that are achieving maximum results. Strategic benefits are as follows:

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      • Transition of high-cost support services to low-cost channels( For example, transition customers from phone-based support to web-based self-service)
      • Determine the drivers of cross-channel churn (For Example, issues that cause clients to seek extra added support from the phone service centers as it is not possible for them to complete self-service activities on the website).
      • Capture visitor behavior across channels (For example, correlation of in-store purchases with web-based purchases)
      • Get a holistic view of customer motivations (drivers) bringing them to the website.

5. Track Progress and Review Strategy Regularly

The most crucial step is to revisit the agenda and goals of your website. It is important to protect your strategy from falling by the wayside. This is a major part of your governance implementation. The things that ar most required to create a good web governance model are as follows;

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      • Accountability: The roles, responsibilities, and duties of the website.
        Following the concept of 4Ws and 1 H: who does what, when, why and how?
      • Accessibility: The access to complete data, integration with the other systems and availability standards of the website.
        Accurate, timely and direct availability to the stakeholders of analytics and reports is majorly important.
      • Community
        Representation from all relevant business units with full participation by the owners of the companies and technology teams plays a vital role.
      • Uniformity
        Definitions and policies set for all the web analytics reports, terminology, KPIs & calculations, reporting cycles, information dissemination, and routine review of governance for all the enhancements.

Image Credits: stratenet.com, activegarage.com, mediashower.com and digitalvidya.com.

Top 20 Web Analytics Tools Marketers Must Know

In any business, web analytics tools which has data tracking ability and interpretation is important to make good choice as it determines the fate of the company i.e. whether the business will succeed or fail !

Every business whether small or big needs to collect, track and analyze their data. But trying to understand the collected can be very confusing. Every time an individual visits your website, they brings with them a new set of data which needs to be collected, measured, analyzed and reported. Enlisted below are the top 20 web analytics tools that every marketer must know:

Google Analytics1

Google Analytics is used track and analyse the web traffic data by generating a report that provides information about visitors, content, traffic sources etc. of a website.

Woopra2

A real-time website analysis tool, Woopra is a platform which is used primarily by sales and marketing companies to provide aggregated customers analytics report.

Clicky3

Clicky is amongst one the most powerful tools that offers a link report that depicts all external websites sending traffic to your website. This tool is considered almost as good as Google Analytics.

Chartbeat4

A real-time data analytics tool, Chartbeat helps you to make swift decisions about your website based on the user-content interaction.

Mint5

Mint is a customizable tool that tracks basic statistical facts such as traffic trends, popular pages, searches etc. And has a pleasant interface.

KISSmetrics6

KISSmetrics provides comprehensive real-time data that enables you to improve upon the conversion rates.

UserTesting7

UserTesting offers a unique platform to gather information about the website users.

MouseFlow8

By implementing this Web Analytics tool, the user can watch the video of the users that interact with your website, as well as view heat maps to see the effect of changes you have made on your page.

Spring Metrics9

Spring Metrics differs from its contemporary tool, Google Analytics with the fact that it tracks the visitor’s path through the website right from the time he/she landed on the website to the time he left from website.

Crazyegg10

Crazyegg is one such Web Analytics tool that allows you to have a view what the website visitors are doing on the website’s pages.

Alexa11

Alexa enables the user to analyse how to improve SEO by specifying powerful keywords used by the competitors.

Woorank12

Woorank is an easy to use web analytics tool that gives in-depth analysis of website.

Compete13

Compete is that Web Analytics tool that gives you an edge over the competitors by giving creative intelligence information.

Piwik14

Piwik stores the data on your server by tracking many websites, automatically deleting old data and helps to rank top keywords.

GoSquared15

GoSquared provides notifications about social trends, traffic spikes that helps to measure visitor engagement.

FoxMetrics16

FoxMetrics entails 4 key features viz. Funnels, Profiles, Segments and Triggers with reference to web analysis.

Open Web Analytics17

Open Web Analytics is a free and open source that bears almost the same features as that of Google Analytics.

Site Meter18

This tool gives detailed reports with respect to search keywords, visitor location, entry & exit page, visitor path and outclicks.

StatCounter19

StatCounter helps you to collect information about your information by integrating a special code.

etracker20

Etracker tracks mouse movements to analyse visitor engagement and collects feedback from them to improve upon the website’s usability.

Wish to know about tools for other digital marketing domains Click Here .

Go Mobile Or Go Web? : Webinar Recording

In this era, it is a common sight to witness that the users are stuck with a phrase of ‘Mobile First’. To answer the questions with regards to the aspects like the level of uncertainty, the level of complexity along with the level of ambiguity that crops-up in the present market scenario. Are you in the quest of the answers pertaining to which is better – the mobile or web?

Develop an understanding on the same through the webinar conducted by Kunal Mehta, Lead Trainer at Digital Vidya.